LucasArts Entertainment Company

The famous LucasArts “Gold Guy”

My tenure at LucasArts Entertainment Company was short but sweet.
I quickly became a rising star at the company by busting out 9 MacOS ports in my first year.
Then I was told that I should be working directly on the games instead of porting them, so I joined the Outlaws team and had a blast working on that.
I continued by taking lead on the Jedi Knight expansion pack, Mysteries of the Sith.

Then I got the chance to see an early workprint of
The Phantom Menace
and started working on a new Star Wars game, but my heart really wasn’t in it, and I eventually left to go work on emulation technology at Connectix.
However, it bugged me that the old SCUMM adventure games wouldn’t run well on modern Windows systems, so I went back and did a complete set of Windows Ports as a contractor after I left.

MacOS Ports

Dark Forces was my first official port

My first job at
LucasArts was to port their upcoming game
Dark Forces to the
Macintosh.
The biggest challenge was that Mac users expected us to double the screen resolution while at the same time reducing the memory footprint of the game to nearly half of the
DOS version’s 8MB.

As part of this porting effort, I got the chance to travel to
Austin for an
Apple-sponsored
PowerPC Games Kitchen, where I collaborated with
Eric Traut from Apple on a highly-optimized pixel doubler.
Through an interesting quirk of fate, my next job would be working for Eric at
Connectix.

The next games I ported were
Rebel Assasult II and
The Dig,
both of which used game engines that I had already done most of the work for, so it was just a matter of incorporating new features and improvements to get them out the door.

By this time, I had begun to educate the other developers on how to write portable code, so my porting efforts got easier and easier.
The Mac ports of
Afterlife and
Mortimer and the Riddles of the Medallion went quickly enough
that I was semi-adopted by the Afterlife team to help do some last-minute optimizations (which also benefited the memory-starved Mac port).

My final porting effort was the casual desktop game
Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures.
Unlike the other games, this one had been designed for
Windows from the start, using
MFC, and posed a number of challenges in bringing it over to the Mac.
But I loved the concept so I persevered. Too bad I never got the chance to port the sequel,
Yoda Stories.

Outlaws

Outlaws was LEC’s first full-fledged Windows game

Of all the games I worked on at
LucasArts,
Outlaws
is probably the one I’m most proud of.

Unfortunately, we didn’t really trust Microsoft’s libraries: things were pretty unstable in those early days.
So every major subsystem in Outlaws was designed around
DLLplug-ins that allowed us to easily substitute non-Microsoft libraries for video, sound, etc.

One of the big challenges Outlaws faced was that the in-game
cutscenes were significantly longer than in any other LucasArts game to date.
This was a problem because the
INSANE video playback engine would slowly de-sync the audio and video over time on some systems.

The dreaded final shovel at the end of the opening cutscene

Even worse, the
opening cutscene was almost 10 minutes long, and there was a bit at the end where a shovel is dramatically jammed into the ground.
If there was any timing discrepancy between audio and video, the mismatch would be painfully obvious there.

To solve this, I came up with a mechanism to use the audio playback as a clock and time the video to that.
I distinctly recall watching the full opening cutscene in a conference room with the top folks in the company holding their breath until the shovel scene played with perfect sync.

Outlaws was also LucasArts’ first multiplayer network game, and we unfortunately discovered midway through development that the networking layer was just not holding together.
So I and co-worker taught ourselves a crash-course in
dead reckoning and other network play techniques, and rewrote
the networking system. In the end it held up admirably, regularly surviving 12–16-player games at work.

The Outlaws expansion pack added support for hardware 3D acceleration

For the expansion pack, A Handful of Missions, I was heavily involved in porting the game engine to use hardware-rendered 3D graphics, supporting both
Direct3D and
3dfxGlide via our plug-in system.
The step up to hardware rendering allowed us to run at higher resolutions and really showed off the game well.

The soundtrack is amazing

Today, if you can find a copy, I believe the 3D versions will still run without too much struggle.
And of course the soundtrack (by composer
Clint Bajakian) is still widely considered one of the best videogame soundtracks of all time.
Check it out!

Windows Ports

To be super honest, Day of the Tentacle was one of the main reasons I wanted to revive the games

In late 2001, having been away from LucasArts for 3 years, this was beginning to bother me more and more.
I loved to fire up the games and play them from time to time, but getting them to run on modern
Windows systems was getting increasingly difficult.

So I proposed an idea: how about we update all the games, dating back to Maniac Mansion, to run on top of Windows?
It might sound like a lot of work, but recall that I had already ported a number of the games previously to run on the
Macintosh.

The LEC Entertainment Pack included my updated Full Throttle and Sam & Max Hit the Road (but an old version of The Dig)

As it turns out there actually was a bit of interest in building updated versions of the original games.
So, armed with the original game sources, I went back and converted all the classic adventure games to run on top of a modern Windows system.

Unfortunately, they weren’t all released, but at least some got to see the light of day starting in 2003.
Full Throttle and
Sam & Max Hit the Road appeared on a couple of compilation CDs,
and I heard that international partners might have picked up a larger set, though I never heard for sure what they were.